In the early 20th century, military institutions also helped
popularize and develop regulations for the sport. And today,
military influences linger in the language used to describe
football strategy. As you watch, listen for phrases like "trench
warfare" and "field generals." Even terms like "sacking" and
"blitzing" have roots in war-speak.

"The study of the history of college football has frequently been
focused on particular players and coaches and not on the
country's interest in the game as a whole," said Paul Vasquez, a
social scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
"A lot of people don’t realize how it has become the phenomenon
it has, and how the military’s role played a part in that story."

In its infancy, football was a violent sport that was played only
at elite Northeastern colleges. After the first official college
game, between Yale and Harvard in 1869, football began to spread
westward and southward.

Football first met the armed forces in 1882, Vasquez reported in
the journal Armed Forces & Society. That year, the Naval
Academy in Annapolis, Md., adopted the sport as an important part
of a military education. the United States Military Academy at
West Point followed in 1890. Both institutions used football to
keep cadets fit in and prepare them for the strategies of
warfare.

The game proved popular. By 1892, according to Vasquez' research,
football was played on at least 19 army bases across the country.

In those early years, military teams often played against college
teams, and that occasionally caused problems. In 1894, for
example, two separate games were scheduled to be played on
Thanksgiving Day in Indiana, even though the tradition was for
just the state’s top two teams to play that day.

The president of Purdue University, which was slated for a
Thanksgiving game against Depaw University, grew upset when he
heard of Butler's scheduled game with the Indianapolis Light
Artillery. So, he began sending letters to other college
presidents expressing a number of complaints.

Among them, he suggested that maybe college teams should stop
playing military teams -- not just because simultaneous games
threatened ticket sales, but also because soldiers tended to be
bigger, stronger and older than college students. He worried
about both the safety of his players and the purity of the
college game.

The group that met to address those concerns ended up forming the
first collegiate athletic conference, now know as the "Big 10."
The NCAA, likewise, emerged from concerns that the game was too
violent and caused too many serious injuries and deaths. Captain
Palmer Pierce, the coach of the West Point team, became the
president of that institution, originally called the Inter
Collegiate Athletic Association, which put regulations in place
to make the game less brutal and bloody.

Major wars were important turning points in the popularization of
the game. During World War I, football turned out to be a great
diversion for soldiers, keeping them out of trouble during down
times and helping build teamwork. With more men mobilized on
military camps and bases, the number of people playing football
rose. At the same time, a growing number of civilians gained
exposure to football as they visited bases to watch games, and
that helped create a national taste for the sport.

"The most striking thing to me was how, in World War I, the
military helped democratize football," said Patricia Shields, a
political scientist at Texas State University in San Marcos.
"Back in the 1800s, there was a big division in class between
people who went to college and people who didn’t, and people who
didn’t go to college didn’t necessarily care about college
sports."

"As common people throughout the country began to understand the
game -- and it's not that easy to understand, but you understand
it by playing and enjoying it -- that made it more interesting,"
she added. "Who knows, maybe football wouldn’t be what it is
today without the military."

During World War II, West Point began to recruit athletes with
the understanding that they would be exempt from the draft and
could delay their service if they played on the football team.
The hope for players was that the war would be over before their
turns came, or at least that they could serve as officers instead
of enlisted men.

Even in the thick of wartime in 1942, when nonessential travel
was prohibited and many college games were canceled, the
Army-Navy game took place, partly as a military morale-booster
and partly as a recruitment tool.

In just a year or two after the Second World War, the number of
teams playing intercollegiate football increased by 66 percent.
The development of the GI Bill and athletic scholarships gave
veterans the chance to boost the quality of college ball. And the
professional game fed off of interest that started at the college
level.

It was on military bases that the culture of football emerged,
with military bands playing in the stands and all-male
cheerleaders rooting for players. (Women began cheering when
World War II took so many men away). Even today, the army and
other branches of the military use top-level high school and
college bowl games as opportunities for recruiting, Vasquez said.
The same does not happen with baseball, basketball or other
sports.

These days, the military has less influence over football, but
there are still connections. The Vince Lombardi Super Bowl
trophy, for example, was named for a man who was once an
assistant coach at West Point. And, Vasquez pointed out, New
England Patriots coach Bill Belichick was raised in Annapolis,
where his father worked for more than 30 years as an assistant
football coach at the Naval Academy.